


Conditions, Covenants and Restrictions

by rivkat



Category: Supernatural
Genre: F/M, Genderswap, Remix
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-24
Updated: 2011-04-24
Packaged: 2017-10-18 14:26:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,866
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/189816
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rivkat/pseuds/rivkat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Promises to keep.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Conditions, Covenants and Restrictions

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Medie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Medie/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Covenant](https://archiveofourown.org/works/101670) by [Medie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Medie/pseuds/Medie). 



“I was watching that,” Dean complained.

Castiel examined the shards of glass on the floor and blinked, restoring her composure. She waved her hand and the dangerous fragments disappeared, though the television was still nonfunctional. “I had understood that you preferred me like this, without a human host. Shall I attempt to find a human willing to share a body with me?”

“No,” Dean said immediately. “No, I’m all over you being a ‘physical manifestation of divine energy’ if it means you don’t bring anybody else into this mess. Just, you think you could keep it in your pants?”

Castiel looked down. She was wearing jeans: jeans Dean had picked out for her, or at least had paid for, given that Sam had provided instruction on the issue of sizing after Dean had refused to comment. Sam had been bright red and barely able to look at her, but at least he’d been marginally helpful in allowing her to approximate the tightness deemed appropriate for women of Castiel’s apparent age and size. After the fuss Dean had made about changing clothes once in a while, not to mention his initial comments on the size of her breasts, the shape of her eyes, and the curves of her hips, it had been frustrating that Dean had then proceeded to ignore her efforts to meet his requirements.

Regardless, Castiel had been under the impression that pants were not jeans. She decided querying him on the idiom was unnecessary, as well as most likely frustrating. “My power occasionally slips the bounds of this physical instantiation. That is the cost of my present form.”

“Yeah, and that’s really fucking reassuring.”

This was a fair complaint, but she thought that it would be better if Dean didn’t know how his presence could affect her. When she felt the pull to him, she could—forget herself. Human sensation was appallingly powerful, paradoxically so given its limitations compared to her true form. It was as if the work she’d done to raise him from Hell had left a mark as permanent on her body as on his, invisible but immanent, a skewed version of her true nature. “I apologize,” she said.

“I still don’t get why you look like that,” he told her, rolling himself to a standing position now that the television was no longer a diversion. “I mean, were you reading one of my magazines, or what?”

Castiel frowned. She didn’t always understand the things Dean said about her body. If this was another of his ill-advised ‘passes,’ she was going to put him to sleep, for both their sakes. From the first, he had reached out to her physical form out of terror, not true desire, a reaction still tainted from his time in Hell. But if Dean didn’t get an answer, he was capable of bringing the question up again and again until she responded. “There was a template,” she conceded. “Not from your pornography, however.” She felt a fluttering thrill as Dean winced—she still did not understand what jokes were acceptable for him and not for her, and she thought that Dean perhaps was equally confused. His discomfort, so distinct from his suffering, intrigued her. “I modeled this form on a devout woman whose prayer I heard.”

“Did you help her?” Dean asked, but didn’t allow her to respond. “Not your mission, right?”

“We do not, as a rule, answer prayer,” she said, restating the truth he’d known long before he’d made his deal. Many believers took comfort in the mere certainty that their worship was heard. Dean would never have been one of those, even had he believed. His unbelief had always been disillusionment; he’d never had any doubts about the existence of Hell.

His distrust in the Father’s larger plan was coloring her, like blood in water. This, more than their beauty, she thought, was what the daughters of men had given angels: reason to doubt.

“What made you go on the fritz, anyway?” Dean asked. “You usually—” He stopped and looked down.

So he had seen, even if he did not want to admit, how her control slipped most when they were—when she was too caught up in watching him. Almost as if the weight of her loyalties had slid down the chain connecting him, through her, to Heaven, a shift of balance that left her with the disconcerting feeling (the illusion, surely) that there were choices here for her to make. Her essence at times seemed as divided from her will as a human’s soul from God: not necessarily determined to disobey, but only guessing what ought to be done. No wonder light bulbs exploded and cats yowled where she passed.

Dean did have a legitimate question, and she had not been ordered to lie to him. “I don’t want you to suffer,” she said.

Dean grimaced. He needed a shave in order to conform to conventional grooming standards of this place and time. He needed many things, most of which he wouldn’t acknowledge. “And killing my TV is your solution? Katie Couric isn’t _that_ —”

She shook her head. “I know that you want to go after Sam. But it must be his choice to renounce the demon, or all will be lost.”

Dean turned away, his shoulders tightening, and she reappeared in his line of sight, because the fact that he did not want to hear this truth did not justify his willful ignorance.

“I know you only desire his protection,” she said, more gently.

The face he turned to her was not far removed from the agony she’d seen in Hell, when he was using his knife on other damned souls. “Are you going to kill him?”

She shook her head. “Not unless my orders change.” Dean’s face twitched in disgust, though she doubted he was aware how visible his reaction was. Her essence juddered with unease, but this time she managed to avoid destroying any more electrical devices.

She absented herself before she could betray herself further.

Dean didn’t like that she followed Heaven’s orders, but he didn’t understand the alternatives. If she had been in charge—but there were concerns of which a lesser angel was of necessity unaware, and there was always free will. Sam could be doing God’s work all unknown. Perhaps the world could only be saved if someone who’d been ill-treated and manipulated, but also loved and raised with a fierce mission, could choose the better of the two paths.

Or God’s plan might be different.

Speculation was dangerous; it could lead to doubt if her imagination failed to match that of the Divine. And yet her orders were confusing, seemingly designed to provoke her charge’s rebellious nature and Sam’s need for answers. All the same, the half-disobedient impulse to cut the struggle short and simply remove the danger Sam posed rose in her less often now that she had seen how Dean loved him.

Human love was perplexing, as much pain as pleasure, but never less than deeply consuming. Dean would have paralyzed himself with guilt for playing the torturer’s role had it not been for his concern for Sam. And her remonstrances. She regretted the early threat to return him to Hell; Hell had been too much on her mind, its corruption not removed by distance. She had been frustrated, unused to doubt.

So corrosive, doubt.

****

And then doubt crested and swept her away. She bled for Dean, slashed her arm and used the forbidden sigils, defied Zachariah and all of Heaven. Her hand on his mouth, his breath hot against her assumed skin, was a shock greater than she’d experienced pulling him from Hell.

After her rebellion, Dean was different. Confident of her, demanding in ways that unsettled and even enraged her, but also an ally in a world so overwhelmingly hostile that she sometimes trembled to consider it. She had been a mote in God’s eye, a single note in the glorious symphony of alleluia; now she was a fugitive, and her smallness against the immensity of Heaven mattered in a way it never had.

Dean stopped attempting to have sexual relations with her vessel, confirming her sense that he had always been testing her. Now, he had reason to fear that she might say yes. She was, of course, only pleased that he had stopped. The temptation was awkward, even if her discomfort no longer had the power to shake the foundations of whatever rental property or abandoned house they had found.

“Does it help?” she asked him one night, when she’d come to discuss a possible sighting of the Horsemen and found him staring into the dregs of an empty bottle. She’d grown used to drawing the poisons from his liver while he slept, a gift even if she could do nothing for his tattered soul. At least, she thought, with a kind of humor that she half wanted to share with him, he’d most likely be dead before her power dissipated so far that even this small healing was beyond her.

Dean blinked slowly at her. His eyes were hazy, his face softened by the alcohol. “Nothing helps, Cas.”

“Nothing,” she said, not quite a question.

“You must be so bummed,” Dean said, his gaze stuttering away from her face. “A junkie and a lush. And you’re just stuck here like something out of Smart Angel, Foolish Choices.”

Carefully, stiffly, she sat down on the bed beside him, despite his surprise. “I don’t want to be part of a Heaven that would orchestrate what has been done to you.” She could feel his heat, the way his breath stirred the air. Distantly she wondered where Sam was, but refrained from asking. “I do not regret my choice.”

“Cas,” Dean said, and his voice was heavy with intent. He shifted, turning his body towards hers. Though she had created this form, it was as free from her control as Dean’s resurrected body; her nipples tightened and she felt a rush of heat between her legs.

Slowly, her constructed heart beating like the wings of the Host, she turned her head towards his. He was so close, his hand rising towards her face. In a moment he would have his fingers on her cheek.

The door rattled, and Dean jumped to his feet, half stumbling.

“Sam,” Castiel said, her voice even. Dean shot her a look somewhere between cautionary and disbelieving.

“Hey,” Sam said. His eyes flicked back and forth between the two of them, assessing. Then he saw the empty bottle on the nightstand and his shoulders slumped, almost imperceptibly. “No luck on that grimoire.”

Castiel nodded. She hadn’t expected a different result.

Dean’s attention was all on Sam. Castiel removed herself. There was nothing left to say, and Dean was marginally better at accepting Sam’s attempts to reach out when there was no other witness.

****

“I rebelled for this? So that you could surrender to them?” Castiel raised her fist, making sure Dean saw it. She drove it into his face, felt the flesh split against her knuckles. There was a raw satisfaction in violence. She punched him in the stomach, and his gasp was like music. She was going to hit him until all the pain and anger had left her, panted out with every blow.

“Cas!” Dean gasped. “Please!”

That she could not tell whether he wanted her to stop or to redouble her efforts only enraged her further. She shoved him again, hanging on so that she felt it when his head smacked against the dirty alley wall. “I gave everything for you. And this is what you give to me.”

Dean sagged, hopeless under the dirt and blood, ground down in a way even Hell had not managed. “Do it. Just do it!”

Castiel hauled him to his feet, instead, and hit him again to ensure his silence as she transported him back to Bobby Singer’s house.

Later, after they’d attempted to save Adam and Dean had destroyed Zachariah and renewed his commitment to the fight against Heaven’s machinations, Castiel came to Dean’s door. Sam had already retreated to the couch downstairs—their fragile truce needed some time to stabilize, Castiel judged. Or, in Sam’s words, “I can’t handle him right now, Cas, could you check on him?”

Dean’s mouth was still swollen from her blows, but he raised his head from the bed and managed a half smile. “Hey.”

Castiel didn’t understand the full meaning of the greeting, but she tried anyway: “Hey.”

Dean’s grin widened, as it often did when he was charmed by her inhumanity. “I’m fine, Cas.”

There was almost no definition of the term ‘fine’ that Dean fit, but she was not prepared to argue the point. “I’m glad to hear it.”

Dean patted the bed near his hip. Castiel sat, twisting so that she could see him. She took care not to touch him, though they were only inches apart. She had raised those bruises. She would have done more had Dean’s own despair not disgusted her so. In him, she’d seen her own weakness, and she’d struck out at what she despised in herself. She wondered, now, how much of human evil could be explained in similar fashion.

“Can I ask you something?”

She tilted her head. “Yes.”

“Why does Michael need me? You built yourself a body, right, not dragging any poor sucker into this, so why not him?”

Castiel looked down at her hands, then back to Dean. “I did not tell you the entire truth about that.” Dean waited, his eyes huge and green, his skin blooming with bruises. “Zachariah ordered me to create my own form. He believed that taking a vessel invited … seduction by the human host. The knowledge of the body, of its pleasures, might be corrupting, for all that the presence of a host makes our Earthly strength easier to focus. Michael of course is not subject to such temptations, and he will need all the advantages he can get to fight Lucifer, who has his own human host already.”

Dean nodded, slowly. “But you picked our side anyway. Without a real body.”

“This body is real,” she replied. She hesitated, then reached out to place her hand over his. Her knuckles were still swollen. “I feel as you do.”

“Oh, Cas, the jokes I could make,” Dean said, almost wistful.

She wanted a human host, suddenly and fiercely. If she had a true body, she might be able to understand these feelings, so visceral—throbbing deep in her sex organs and her chest, making her fingers tingle, making her sweat. Surely humans must have some means of control that her mere imitation lacked. Touching Dean in violence had felt so good, easy and natural, a release of the tension even now building between her legs.

Dean must have seen something in her eyes, or understood the changed pattern of her breathing.

“Dean,” she said, a warning, a plea.

“Cas.” He was wide-eyed, as if he hadn’t really ever believed she might touch him in tenderness. And she tried to be tender, keeping her weight from his bruised ribs, letting him settle her the best way on top of him. But it was so difficult, even without a full angelic form to keep in check, the desire running through her like the mandate of Heaven, unconstrained.

He said her name, and God’s, and she took him inside herself in a way no angel should. He cupped her breasts in his hands and squeezed until she forgot that she had ever lacked this form. He put his hands on her hips and guided her, rocking slowly even when she cried out and bit down on his shoulder.

“Why?” he asked her, after, when they were lying side by side, her forehead pressed to his chest. She finally understood the human need for touch, and at the same time for distance, so she did not look up.

Many answers she could give would frighten him, or make him think less of her.

Dean had not asked why she had beaten him.

So she forced her voice to the tone she always used when she was quoting a human phrase back at him—often his own—and wriggled her body a fraction closer. “Why not?” she asked.

Dean chuckled, warm and quiet, and she relaxed.

Dean rolled onto his back with a slightly pained wheeze. Castiel felt a pulse of guilt, there and gone. She’d done worse to Dean in the name of the Lord, rebuilding his flesh and then threatening him with return to Hell. At least she’d done this damage in her own name.

“No more leaving,” she whispered. She didn’t need to hear Dean’s assent. They’d all betrayed each other, her and Dean and Sam. They were done with that.

Perhaps she should have taken a host, a barrier between her essence and Dean’s humanity. Perhaps she would not have fallen had she done so. But Dean would never have touched her in the flesh of another, she understood this now, and so she could not regret. Though there were horrors yet to come, they would face them together.


End file.
